Battelle and the Box That Changed Commerce
Near Columbus, Ohio
Chester Carlson spent eleven years being rejected.
Between nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen forty-four, he approached more than twenty companies with his idea for electrophotographic dry copying, a process for making copies of documents without wet chemicals, without the mess of the carbon-paper and mimeograph technology that offices depended on. IBM said no. General Electric said no. RCA said no. The companies that were most positioned to profit from his idea were the most resistant to it.
In nineteen forty-four, Carlson brought his idea to Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, a nonprofit research organization founded in nineteen twenty-nine on the campus near Ohio State University. Battelle took it. They developed it. By nineteen forty-eight they had produced the first xerographic office copies. They partnered with a small photographic supply company in Rochester, New York called the Haloid Company. Haloid renamed itself Xerox. By nineteen fifty-nine the Xerox Nine Fourteen, the first automatic plain-paper copier, had changed American offices permanently.
Battelle also had a hand in the thing you watched a grocery store cashier pass over a scanner a hundred times today. In the early nineteen seventies, Battelle developed the Universal Product Code, the barcode. The first commercial UPC scan occurred on June twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-four, at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. A ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was the first item scanned. That pack of gum is in the Smithsonian.
Battelle remains a private nonprofit research organization in Columbus. It employs roughly forty thousand people, many of them scientists and engineers, across its global operations and the national laboratories it manages. Its building on King Avenue sits near the Ohio State campus, unremarkable from the outside, in the way that places that changed the world sometimes are.
